Hangar House

The Challenge

One of the challenges that emerged early on in the design of the house was the management of lighting. The main living/entertaining area is a large open space. The kitchen, dining room, great room, game (pool table) room, main floor hallway, wet bar, and even the foyer flow into a one large space. The second floor balcony and office are open to the the first floor, and hence the lighting in those areas will affect the great room. Even the master bedroom is visible from the great room through the two interior windows.

A party evolves from the greeting of guests, the inevitable "hanging out" in the kitchen, spreading people out into the great room and perhaps the game room, sitting down to dinner in the dining room, after-dinner conversation in the great room, or retiring to the game room, and then to departure of guests. In a wide-open floor plan, moving around to change lighting in all the various "scenes" that occur in such a party can be tedious or downright silly. Outside lighting requirements might include turning on deck lighting with or without the outside sconces or stairway/path lighting. In the front of the house, there might the need to just have the front door sconces on, or all front pathway lighting, or all landscape lighting, and so on.

Therefore, early on we decided to include some kind of lighting control system that would give us independent control of each light circuit in each room, but allow us to collect various lights at predetermined dimming levels into various scenes. Scenes might include:

"normal" evening outside lighting (front and rear)
guests-expected outside lighting
deck entertaining
panic (all lights on inside and out)
normal cooking (various kitchen lighting modes)
entertaining cooking
dining
game room only
entertaining
watching TV
working in the office (various work modes)
arriving home (interior pathway lighting)
and so on

Options Considered

We researched home automation systems and went to a bunch of trade shows to see what's out there. There are lots of systems to look at. Some are designed for new construction, and depend on low voltage wiring for control signals.

The high-end systems centralize all light circuit switching in a wiring closet. Line voltage is controlled by dimmers or relays in the closet. The dimmers are connected to the in-room controls via low-voltage wiring. In this way, any button can be programmed to control essentially anything. Often these systems have touch screens as "master controls" and typical room lighting switches to manage individual circuits. Of course, once the low voltage wiring is in place, it's hard to change the physical configuration, although it should be easy to reprogram switches.

We also investigated systems targeted primarily at remodels or upgrades. The primary two approaches to retrofits are powerline control (such as X10 systems) and radio frequency systems. Powerline systems send control signals over the house's 120V AC lines. Existing switches are replaced with dimmers that can be controlled over the "hot" line in the regular household wiring. There are several issues associated with powerline systems, including noise on the line (occasionally causing flicker or audible hum,) and the fact that houses are wired with two hot lines (the two sides of the 220V line voltage.) So, bridges and noise suppressers need to be installed, and in the end, the whole system seems like a kludge for new construction.

Radio frequency systems are also available for retrofits. In a retrofit situation, the house is already wired for traditional switches. The idea is that the "regular" switches are replaced with controllable switches that communicate with each other and with the central controllers using radio frequencies. No extra low voltage wiring is required.

Sometimes, shortcuts are taken, such as bringing the line voltage to the switched device (eg, a ceiling light fixture,) and then running a "switch leg" to the wall switch. In this case, there is no neutral wire available at the switch location. In most circuits, even this can be circumvented, but not always. But in most cases, "standard" household wiring can be used with a retrofit wireless system.

We looked at Crestron (very expensive), Lutron Homeworks, and several others. In each case, it seemed expensive overkill for what we were building. Furthermore, we were concerned about finding an electrician who could deal with the complexities of such a system. At one point, we contacted a new vendor in the Redding area who specialized in home automation. He confirmed the issue about finding trades that could deal with the new, automated home systems.

In the end, we chose the Lutron RadioRA system, a lighting control system based on radio frequency communications. This is seemingly intended for retrofit applications, but can certainly be used in new construction. It has the benefit that any electrician can wire a house for use with RadioRA with just a few baseline requirements, such as "no switch legs!"

Lutron RadioRA

The Lutron RadioRA system provides the control capabilities we need. It appears to be designed for small to medium household applications. Our house is, in fact, pushing the envelope for RadioRA. For example, the RadioRA system is designed to control up to 32 circuits. That's plenty for a small house. For our house, we came up with some 45 circuits that we wanted controlled. Just in time, Lutron introduced a device that will bridge two "systems." That doubled the number of supported circuits to 64.

The RadioRA system supports dimmers in stand-alone, 3-way and 4-way configurations. It supports non-dimming switches, such as switched outlets. It supports dimming magnetic and electronic fluorescent ballasts, low voltage lighting, shade controls, and general switch closure devices. It even supports a car visor control that can activate any programmed circuits as well as garage door openers. It supports an astronomical clock that allows timed control of lighting scenes. One interesting feature is the vacation mode -- it will record seven days of actual lighting usage in the house, and then play the entire sequence back as a vacation program.

The system offers multibutton controllers that fit into single, double and triple gang boxes. Each "gang" offers up to five buttons that can be programmed to control individual circuits, multiple circuits ("rooms"), or "scenes." For example, one button can be used as a secondary location to control a light (in lieu of a traditional 3-way for 4-way switch), another button can be used to turn on multiple lights and treat them as a single light circuit. In these modes, the buttons are "on-off" buttons as they are replacing "standard" switches. On the other hand, the control can be programmed to control scenes. A scene is a predetermined collection of light circuits turned on (or off) to a predetermined dimming level.

For example, the "dining scene" might turn on the dining room ceiling cans to a certain dimming level, turn off the kitchen ceiling lights, turn on the under cabinet fluorescents, turn off the lights in the game room, turn on low background lighting in the great room, set low level "passageway lighting" to the guest bathroom, and set upstairs lighting to low or off. Scene buttons are not "on-off" buttons -- pressing the button turns the scene on.

The multibutton control works by sending signals to each switch that controls a circuit that is programmed into the definition of a button. That signal is sent over a radio frequency (418 MHz unless you live in Manhattan -- then you're actually using RadioRB instead of RadioRA). To ensure that all controls are within radio range, there is a limit to how far controls can be from a radio repeater (30 feet). To reach beyond the limit, multiple repeaters are installed. In an extended system that uses a bridge to extend beyond 32 circuits, the bridge is itself a repeater. In our house, it turns out that we use only the bridge and no repeaters are necessary to get coverage of the volume of our two-story house.

When designing a home lighting system with RadioRA, several design considerations change the way the house is wired. First, as mentioned above, a power line is brought to each switch location, and then the switched lines run to the fixture. No hot-only switch legs are installed. Normal 3-way and 4-way wiring is used where necessary. However, we eliminated several 3-way and 4-way switches by using multibutton controls instead.

For example, the pendant lights over the breakfast bar are hardwired to a dimmer by the dining room exterior door across the room. There is no switch right at the breakfast bar that controls those lights. We had to assure the electrician multiple times that we wanted it wired this way intentionally. Because of the breakfast bar's central location, we have a 15-button control installed in the short wall adjacent to the great room. One of the buttons is programmed to be a simple on-off switch for the pendant lights over the breakfast bar. It sends a radio signal across the room to the hardwired switch by the door to control the lights. On the 15-button control, there are raise/lower buttons to control the dimming level as well. Therefore, the 3-way wiring that would normally have been used in this case was eliminated.

In fact, there are very few actual 3-way or 4-way switches installed. Most of the multiple location controlling of circuits is handled through multibutton controls. We do have hardwired 3-way circuits for some outside lighting, primarily because doing this made it easy to keep the primary switch for every circuit in the first or second story (ie, well within radio range of the bridge). For example, the switches for the sconces on either side of the hangar door are hardwired 3-way switches. The main radio control switch will be in the dining room, and the RadioRA accessory dimmer (the "3-way" secondary switch) is hardwired next to the hangar access door.

The RadioRA system has enough bells and whistles for our project. Even though it was designed for retrofits, in an area where sophisticated wiring is a stretch for the contractor or cost is a consideration, RadioRA is a good choice since most wiring is completely standard. We program the system ourselves. We have been working directly with the Lutron area distributor with technical questions, and it seems we have the system pretty well figured out.

One final challenge to the system will be ensuring that guests can figure out how to turn lights on and off without a 4-hour course in RadioRA systems usage!

Typical RadioRA Components

Standard dimmer - This is what the typical light switch looks like. It is a dimmer that comes in 600W and 1000W variations, and it is augmented with another power transformer for certain other applications (such as fluorescent dimming).

The Accessory Dimmer looks just like it (minus the LEDs,) but acts as a slave in 3-way/4-way hardwired applications. Non-dimming switches (such as used with switched outlets) look similar but don't have the LEDs or raise/lower button.

Master controls - These are the "small button" 5, 10 and 15-butotn controls. They actually come in two varieties: with and without the dimmer raise/lower buttons. These are shown without the dimmer control. Each "column" of buttons is designated either "room" controls or "scene" controls. The only "small button" control we used is the one 15-button control at the breakfast bar.

Large button master controls - For all other master control locations we selected the large button controls. Two variations are shown: the left control has an "All On/ All Off" option, and the right control has the raise/lower dimmer controls. The advantage of these controls, besides the larger size of the buttons, is that the button labels are custom engraved with our applications and they are backlit.

Chronos bridge - This device is the bridge that doubles the capacity of the RadioRA system. It also provides the network interface that will allow us to program and manage the system from our PC network. This device will be in Mike's upstairs closet and provide coverage to all switches within a sphere that has has a 30-foot radius. We remembered to install a Cat 6 cable from the closet to the wiring closet just in the nick of time. This was the first use of the blue smurf tubes intended to handle system expansion. See Day 217.

Signal repeater -- We thought we would use one signal repeater on the first floor, probably in the AV cabinet. It turned out we didn't need it. This device needs to be within 60 feet of the Chronos bridge, and then it provides a sphere of control with a radius of 30 feet. Between the upstairs Chronos bridge and the downstairs signal repeater, we should have all the coverage we need.

Garage doors -- We will have visor controls that talk to the "mother ship" to turn on a light scene as well as open garage door(s). This means that the programming can control two of the three garage doors (for now) and when we drive up, we can activate lighting that illuminates the driveway, the garage, and pathway lighting in the house.